Tag: Authors

Writers' Tools of the Trade, writing romance

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #4 WRITE OR DIE

I’ve mentioned this tool before but it bears repeating. In fact, Dr. Wicked and his evil productivity tool Write or Die were in the dedication of my book RIDE I used it so much to make my deadline for that novel. You can use the lighter Write or Die online version for free, or buy  the enhanced desktop edition to install on your computer for use offline ($10 and compatible with MAC, PC & Linux). You choose your time limit (or word count) and for the duration chosen you have to continue to type into the window or it starts to “remind” you. Gently at first with flashing colors, then not so gently with horrible audio ranging from cars honking, to babies crying, to the Hansen Brothers singing. Once you start to type again, the annoyances stop too. I find I can do 500 words easily, usually more, every 15 minutes when using Write or Die. So if I set a 1500 daily wordcount for myself, I can get my work done plus extra with one 48 minute session on Write or Die. IF I can force myself to sit down and actually do it, which I generally fail to do. The concept […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade, writing romance

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #3 TWITTER

I am a self-proclaimed promo ‘ho and proud of it. Day three of my favorite tools brings us one promotional platform I employ, Twitter. Yes, I will admit when I first heard about Twitter I didn’t get it at all. When I try to explain Twitter to my non-tweeting friends, I really can’t (in spite of my vast professional expertise as a wordsmith). So what is Twitter and why does it deserve to be named among my 7 most valuable tools of my trade? It’s a social networking site that limits user updates to 140 characters each Tweet unless you employ one of the lengthening tools (which I do sometimes, though I feel like I’m cheating when I do, LOL). It’s kind of like the user status updates you see on Facebook, but it’s a one way system. I can follow anyone I want and see their tweets. Anyone can follow me and see mine (unless I block them for being a perv or a spammer). It is not the mutual “friending” you find on Facebook profile pages. Since I use it as a professional tool, I do like the Twitter “follow” system better than the Facebook “friend” system. Now why […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #2 WORDPRESS

Day two of my favorite tools week brings WordPress. Yes, WordPress was originally a blogging format, but it is so much more. With WordPress, there is absolutely NO reason to not have a FREE professional-looking, unlimited, easy to maintain website. Yes, I said free for the basic account which includes tons of free templates in addition to premium templates you can choose to pay for, unlimited pages and your own wordpress URL. So for instance, when I first signed up, I claimed www.catjohnson.net as my own. That was when I was still paying lots of money to GoDaddy to host my website. For a monthly fee, GoDaddy limited me to 5 pages maximum, charged me extra if I exceeded my bandwidth for the month, had a very limited amount of images I could host there, their design templates weren’t very nice and it used to take me all day to update my site with their built-in design program. I still pay a small annual fee to GoDaddy to register my catjohnson.net domain name, but now, for a nominal annual fee (something like $12 a year paid to WordPress) my domain is redirected to my free WordPress account so http://catjohnson.net appears in […]